Visions of Love
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Recently I sat one evening in the ballroom of a huge hotel in the heart of a renowned metropolis. The banquet tables were crowded with attractively attired men and women-- brothers and sisters in the most majestic family circle in the universe. Great chandeliers lighted the room and accented the Oriental wall panels of red and gold. Skilful black waiters clad in matching uniforms glided noiselessly between the groups of seated guests, pampering appetites educated to gourmet status by an epicurean society.
When the feast was finished and the sound of animated conversation had subsided, a man arose to speak. His ability was immediately apparent. His oratorical powers lent strength to his every sentence. He began by reading the words of Jesus about the new commandment, which really was the old commandment written again in the blood drawn from his own veins. The speech was flawless in content and articulation. The points were pressed home to friendly hearts, and the illustrations which reinforced them were meaningful and well chosen.
But suddenly I found myself in thought in yesterday's world of two millennia ago. I was not turned out to the speaker. His words found their way into my consciousness, but on wings of mental fantasy I soared back into the simpler world where all of the external trappings of the Now fall away! Perhaps an ancient prophet would have said that I was caught up in the Spirit. A modern psychologist would have replied that it was merely a case of thought transference sparked by association. I do not try to
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First, I found myself looking down upon a lonely island, a rocky promontory jutting up out of the greenish-blue water of a mist-shrouded sea. The mewing of wheeling gulls served to break the silence along a shore where the spume and spray marked the death of rolling waves moving in like soldiers marching relentlessly to their doom. Then I saw the grotto in which sat a bearded man whose wrinkled face spoke eloquently of his age. He was writing, dipping the calamus into an inkhorn and penning words with an awesome concentration upon the task.
The thought struck me that this was the one-time fisherman, John, last survivor of the little group summoned to be with the Son of man during his earthly pilgrimage. It was he who wrote about love more than any other, and now he was here, forsaken and yet faithful, paying the price which true love exacts during a time of crisis. It was his fate to be alive when the two great philosophies met head-on at the crossroads of history. "Might makes right" was the watchword of the Caesars, and "right makes might" was the motto of the Christ, and now the aged saint was temporarily banished by Domitian, and was in the isle called Patmos for the testimony of the word. Love may mean loneliness, banishment, and waiting for the angels to come.
Then I was whirled away to look down upon the spreading city sprawled across the seven hills, the Great Whore flirting with the kings of the earth, drunken by the wine of her own lust, exuding the sour stench of her own vomit, yet clothed in scarlet, and summoning the wealthy of the earth to her intoxicated embrace. There were the dirty ghettoes with their stinking tenements, with sottish men and sodden women crawling in and out of them like insects.
But the divine spotlight sought out the inner fastness of the dank Mamertine prison, and brought into focus a man with a long chain fastened to a shackle above his ankle and the other end fastened to a hasp in the belt of a member of the Praetorian guard. There was room for the prisoner to walk about but I saw him sitting on a low stool in the shaft of light beaming through a narrow aperture serving as a window in the thick stone wall. He was writing on a sheet of parchment, thoughtfully setting down a message while tears welled up in his eyes like water flowing from tne soul's unseen cistern.
I knew that I was looking at Paul, the oft-battered ambassador, and I remembered what he had previously written to the Lord's underground in this teeming world capital. "Owe no man anything but to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the whole law." Love had led him into a life of hardship and suffering, "in pumeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren."
The way of love may be the road to prison. He who once hated and breathed out threatenings and slaughter, casting men and women into prison, now loved, but drank from the same bitter cup which he once held to the lips of other saints. Love does not count the cost. It keeps no account of returns. So it enabled the aging captive to write, "And I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved."
Once more the mental camera swung upon its pivot and I glimpsed a skulllike hill with three crosses stark againt the Judean sky. Over the center one, like a rainbow, the word love was arched in technicolor and I knew that here was the love center of the universe, and all human love was simply a beam or ray flashing from it. And I remembered again those words which have challenged me ever since I first read them, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Herein is love!
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Suddenly I was back in the great hall again, looking at modern men and women, twentieth century brothers and sisters. And I wondered if love was a verbalization in a vocabulary, a subject for sermons, and an exercise in expression. It is wonderful to sit with the saints in a sharing situation, to break bread with those whom you cherish for their faith. Still the gray ghosts of long ago keep marching through the corridors of the heart and as one sees the scars, the blood and the bruises, he wonders if love has grown fragile and delicate until it can no longer believe all things, bear all things and endure all things. The humble soul chastened by the memories of what has been can only cry out anew, "Lord, teach me to love!" Let us walk in that light!